It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] admin team
took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their
transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it’s users
will not be allowed to proceed. We strongly encourage other instance
administrators to do the same, given the grave threat they pose to the
fediverse.
Currently you can with with Lemmy Connect. Maybe with others as well, given the amount of apps coming out by the day. And I’m guessing they’ll fold the feature into Lemmy/Kbin proper sometime in the future.
My (limited) understanding is that if you (we) block other instances locally, that won’t stop meta (or whoever) from accessing your (our) information and posts.
Right, there are limitations to app based user blocking of instances. Lemmy/Kbin proper would need to implement a robust user account privacy framework to provide the granular control you’re interested in. Personally, I’d like to see this as well.
Currently, Connect has that option, but it doesn’t actually block the instance, it just doesn’t show feeds from that instance. So, technically, the two instances are still federated.
Same, I was only donating $2 a month but I’m not alone in finding this completely unacceptable. I applied at lemmy.ml. It’s the scorpion and the frog with these people suggesting we should just wait and see.
“~Let’s see if Zuck doesn’t act like an anti-competitive asshole this time” <–where the hell is the logic in that?!
Currently, there is no way, though a migration of a user profile from one instance to another is planned as a feature, but not currently being worked on.
This behavior is why the fediverse alienate users and makes it hostile for new people to join.
They didn’t do anything, yet. Give them the chance but start with 2 strikes on their account already. They fuck up, THEN you defederate. Innocent until proven otherwise.
Edit: go on, downvote me. Show me your face. Show me how you’re all against growth on Lemmy and niceness to each other.
There are many years of proof already about facebook/meta acting very maliciously, actively breaking laws and being fined for it, is that not proof enough? How many more do you need before you can say they’re not innocent at all?
Corporations like Meta have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted to play nice with anyone else. Have we already forgotten about Cambridge Analytica or the plethora of other scandals they’ve been at the center of? The proof has been in plain view for a while now.
They don’t get more data because they’re federated. They literally the exact same amount of data as they do know just by scraping mastodon or Lemmy. They’re an even player in this market. Somehow you all keep forgetting that. If you don’t want meta do have data from activity pub, you being here already violates that ideal.
Okay, but that doesn’t address any of the points I brought up.
You said to give Meta a chance. The rest of us are broadly gesturing at all the shit they’ve done in the past, and how we want as little to do with that as possible.
There is nothing they can do to fuck up your experience, ESPECIALLY on Lemmy though. Threads is a completely different concept from Lemmy and activity pub is well defined.
The only thing they could do is just not moderate threads and therefore putting spam in everyone’s feeds. That’s about it. I don’t think they’re leaving that unmoderated.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like it would be trivially easy for Meta to make an army of bot accounts to manipulate whichever posts they want into being near the top of people’s feeds. That could be regular ads disguised as normal posts (a la Reddit-style guerilla marketing), or even more political astroturfing.
Innocent until proven otherwise is a concept for criminal court.
We aren’t putting someone in jail, we are looking at their past business practices and deciding not to do business with them based on their obvious habits.
I suppose Metas history of actively being a bad actor working against societies best interests and enabling hate groups doesn’t qualify as ‘something’…
User pointed to a history of bad behaviour to counter the idea of “lets wait”. User suggested to learn from history and use that as a metric for decisions.
You just trolled your way into this and think consequentially you are ‘clever’. You are not.
This is great. Then all the people complaining that lemmy.world is “too big” can now be appeased with others leaving lemmy.world. Glad to see the community solve each other’s problems organically! :)
Thanks for this! Just gave this a try, downloaded from .world just fine, but uploading to .ml gives this error: ERROR: Failed Login - HTTP status client error (403 Forbidden) for url (https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/user/login)
Thanks for the feedback. The username and password are indeed correct. I copied and pasted from Bitwarden and used the exact same ones to login to the lemmy.ml site. I do wonder if there is some sort of anti-bot measures that Colonel Sanders mentioned below.
Also: I tried just my username vs email but neither worked and I also don’t have MFA enabled yet. Super weird.
I’m not very tech savvy when it comes to this, but would it have anything to do with the anti-bot stuff that lemmy.ml has implemented in the sign-up process? You now have to answer a few questions and basically write your reason for making an account before it lets you even submit the request for review.
To use the tool you need to make your new account first manually - then you can port over your settings with the tool - so it shouldn’t be affected by this.
So no, lemmy.ml shouldn’t be blocking it, unless it’s got something enabled to disable all API logins - though I would think that would break everything (i.e. apps).
Honestly it isn’t. Nothing about the Fediverse is private or inherently secure in that way. Everything is public. And you should assume that everything you publish through activity pub could eventually be looked at by anyone. If you want private or secure messaging there are non-activity pub open source secure alternate. In fact signing up for Lemmy there’s even a field to enter for one. Whether or not a server federates with meta. Meta is still going to data mine the ever-loving shit out of all of them. The point is. None of us are at Meta’s wim about being flooded with their toxic content.
Honestly I want to see meta flooded with our content. So much anti-threads anti Meta sentiment. Actual leftists. And not just make believe right-wing liberals who’ve been conditioned to think that they are left. It would be hilarious to watch Meta try to play wack-a-mole sanitizing everything. To please their reptilian corporate overlords. And if you don’t care and just don’t want to see it. You can always block them personally. Why let them data mine in peace. I say we make them work for it.
I’m not real sure how much the Threads Algorithm is going to pass through Mastodon content (and even less sure if it will even be able to pass through Lemmy content). I think the much more valuable aspect is you can pitch your Threads friends that they can move to the Fediverse and actually get to choose what content they see rather than which influencers paid Meta to fill up your feed.
Agreed about influencers. Meta wouldn’t be doing this at all if they didn’t have a plan (or multiple plans) to monetize it. The whole reason I left Reddit and plan to leave Twitter was that I very much dislike having any part of my online enjoyment at the mercy of the whims of gigantic corporate assholes that think they are far more important than they are. Meta has been an awful and abusive actor in the tech world, why would any freedom-loving person want anything to do with them in a freedom-loving space?! Why would anyone just wait and see what they do this time to decide they’re an awful company with only their profits in mind and no qualms about making those profits at a cost to its users?!
Oh they are going to fight it either way no doubt. But why make it easy on them I say. And you’re right. If we have access to their content and can provide actual linear feeds like people want with no toxic algorithms. It’s win-win for us and still mostly a loss for them. Even if we defiederate with them they’re still going to data mine we just cut ourself off from reaching those people preemptively.
It’s not really about privacy, though. It’s about the risk of Meta going “Embrace, extend, extinguish” on the fediverse, and the only way to protect against that is by not letting them interact with the majority of it from the get-go. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
People keep saying that. Like it’s something that actually happens. And let’s be clear, it has happened with a number of commercial products. But Microsoft and others have never managed to EEE email, HTTP/HTTPS, Usenet, Linux, Java even. And they’ve tried haaaaaaaaaard. Google didn’t EEE XMPP either. It still exists. I use it daily. The author is misrepresenting what happened.
What happened is that too many people felt obligated to work with corporation that had little interest in working with them. Rather than to focus on their own system and continue to update or develop it. Neglecting their core user base, chasing after people who didn’t seek it out and didn’t care what they were using so long as it worked. They wasted time and effort. But Google didn’t actually kill anything. And all the people using Google talk typically weren’t interested about XMPP in the first place and never would be.
It goes beyond that even. Lemmy is developed by socialists. And not just the more reasonable bunch of socialists like myself. But straight up militant leninists. They’re part of the core development team if not the whole thing. And they have no interest in catering to or coddling misbehaving corporations. They are going to do what they want and what they feel they need to do when they need to do it. And if meta or anyone else tries to screw it up. They’re not going to pay one single bit of attention to them and just keep on doing what they’ve been doing
I would add to this that its not just the fediverse, anything you put on the internet should be assumed to be public and non-deletable. Even with GDPR and everything, if the host deletes everything there could dtill be backups, archives, or some random person, corporation, or government could backup everything. Use secure services like signal for things you want to be private and just assume everything else could be public forever.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !plugins@sh.itjust.works
This is a tool with a GUI that does profile migration. You can use it in Windows and Linux. It migrates almost everything, including subscribed communities.
It doesn’t matter what app you use to connect to Lemmy, it works with the Lemmy API. But, if you’re asking if it only works on a desktop, that’s a yes. And it works on MacOS as well, just read that in the info.
Oh damn guess I will migrate to lemmy.ml and use that until I find out if lemmy.world defederates or not.
(Edit turns out it is run by tankies and they are federated with lemmygrad.) While I may or may not stay on lemmy.world depending on if we federate with meta or not. I will no longer suggest Lemmy.ml.
Thank you and the other admins for the thoughtful and transparent answer.
We would like to express our disappointment with the negative and threatening tone of some of these discussions
Considering that a great percentage of the Fediverse userbase are ex-users of Reddit and Twitter that left due to CEO actions, I get that they (including me) don’t trust Meta or want anything to do with them. I agree that discussion should be civil nonetheless.
What exact behaviors are they looking for that would cause them to push the block button?
Threads can do very well for themselves without the fediverse as they are already demonstrating. What real motive do they have to join the fediverse except to shut it down?
Facebook doesn’t give a shit about its users and treats them and their data as a crop to harvest. On Meta platforms, you’re the product. On the fediverse, you’re just another user, free to do what you want. Disgust is indeed an emotion, and I’m 100% fine with being disgusted with Meta.
Oh look, this place is just like Reddit with the rational talk buried in the comments. Thank you for being here despite the apparently unpopular opinion we share.
The admins stated on Mastodon that they’re not going to defederate until something happens. Knowing Meta they shouldn’t give them the chance.
Here’s the link: https://mastodon.world/@mwadmin/110654590632768079
Thats unfortunate. I’ll be moving instances then. Giving Meta a chance is a lot like giving a mosquito a chance to not suck your blood.
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Currently you can with with Lemmy Connect. Maybe with others as well, given the amount of apps coming out by the day. And I’m guessing they’ll fold the feature into Lemmy/Kbin proper sometime in the future.
My (limited) understanding is that if you (we) block other instances locally, that won’t stop meta (or whoever) from accessing your (our) information and posts.
Right, there are limitations to app based user blocking of instances. Lemmy/Kbin proper would need to implement a robust user account privacy framework to provide the granular control you’re interested in. Personally, I’d like to see this as well.
Currently, Connect has that option, but it doesn’t actually block the instance, it just doesn’t show feeds from that instance. So, technically, the two instances are still federated.
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Its like that story of the frog helping the scorpion cross the river.
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Same, I was only donating $2 a month but I’m not alone in finding this completely unacceptable. I applied at lemmy.ml. It’s the scorpion and the frog with these people suggesting we should just wait and see.
“~Let’s see if Zuck doesn’t act like an anti-competitive asshole this time” <–where the hell is the logic in that?!
Ikr? When being a competitive asshole is the core of your being, the windows should be closed before something even has a chance to happen.
How does one change instances?
You don’t. Go to a different instance and sign up. Then stopping using this account.
Thank you!
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Currently, there is no way, though a migration of a user profile from one instance to another is planned as a feature, but not currently being worked on.
How do you move? I signed up through .world but don’t want a chance of touching the poo (meta).
You just make a new account with another instance. You get about the same content as before.
If you consume only - yes. if create something - not that easy.
This behavior is why the fediverse alienate users and makes it hostile for new people to join.
They didn’t do anything, yet. Give them the chance but start with 2 strikes on their account already. They fuck up, THEN you defederate. Innocent until proven otherwise.
Edit: go on, downvote me. Show me your face. Show me how you’re all against growth on Lemmy and niceness to each other.
There are many years of proof already about facebook/meta acting very maliciously, actively breaking laws and being fined for it, is that not proof enough? How many more do you need before you can say they’re not innocent at all?
Corporations like Meta have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted to play nice with anyone else. Have we already forgotten about Cambridge Analytica or the plethora of other scandals they’ve been at the center of? The proof has been in plain view for a while now.
They don’t get more data because they’re federated. They literally the exact same amount of data as they do know just by scraping mastodon or Lemmy. They’re an even player in this market. Somehow you all keep forgetting that. If you don’t want meta do have data from activity pub, you being here already violates that ideal.
Okay, but that doesn’t address any of the points I brought up.
You said to give Meta a chance. The rest of us are broadly gesturing at all the shit they’ve done in the past, and how we want as little to do with that as possible.
There is nothing they can do to fuck up your experience, ESPECIALLY on Lemmy though. Threads is a completely different concept from Lemmy and activity pub is well defined.
The only thing they could do is just not moderate threads and therefore putting spam in everyone’s feeds. That’s about it. I don’t think they’re leaving that unmoderated.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like it would be trivially easy for Meta to make an army of bot accounts to manipulate whichever posts they want into being near the top of people’s feeds. That could be regular ads disguised as normal posts (a la Reddit-style guerilla marketing), or even more political astroturfing.
Innocent until proven otherwise is a concept for criminal court.
We aren’t putting someone in jail, we are looking at their past business practices and deciding not to do business with them based on their obvious habits.
If you disagree with me, we’ll then you’re just against niceness, admit you are! Admit you’re against niceness!
troll
“until something happens”
I suppose Metas history of actively being a bad actor working against societies best interests and enabling hate groups doesn’t qualify as ‘something’…
yeah that this point meta just existing is bad
You didn’t say anything of substance.
User pointed to a history of bad behaviour to counter the idea of “lets wait”. User suggested to learn from history and use that as a metric for decisions.
You just trolled your way into this and think consequentially you are ‘clever’. You are not.
They had more substance than your comment.
Yours is of less substance than areogel.
Oh, looks like I’m switching instances.
And done. I love federation.
Same here, partner. Moved yesterday.
This is great. Then all the people complaining that lemmy.world is “too big” can now be appeased with others leaving lemmy.world. Glad to see the community solve each other’s problems organically! :)
How do you do that? I’m subscribed to like 50 conmunities. Would I have to start all over? That doesn’t sound like it’s worth it.
Just gonna name-drop the tool I made to do this :) https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
It’s only been out a few days, let me know if you have any issues!
Thanks. I liked .world but no way will I let meta in.
Thanks for making this!
Awesome! I was hoping this would be possible. I plan to host my own instance hobbit.world and would need to migrate everything.
Also, I’ll defederate any corporate instances. No need to encourage bad actors.
If you’re creating an instance that will not federate with corporate instances, then I would love to join.
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Thanks for this! Just gave this a try, downloaded from .world just fine, but uploading to .ml gives this error: ERROR: Failed Login - HTTP status client error (403 Forbidden) for url (https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/user/login)
That usually means wrong username/password! But if you’re sure, I can make an account on lemmy.ml and give it a shot.
Thanks for the feedback. The username and password are indeed correct. I copied and pasted from Bitwarden and used the exact same ones to login to the lemmy.ml site. I do wonder if there is some sort of anti-bot measures that Colonel Sanders mentioned below.
Also: I tried just my username vs email but neither worked and I also don’t have MFA enabled yet. Super weird.
EDIT: opened an issue on Github: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim/issues/4
I have a fix! Merging the branch and dropping a new release shortly. Thanks for reporting this!
Working great. Thanks for the quick fix!
I’m not very tech savvy when it comes to this, but would it have anything to do with the anti-bot stuff that lemmy.ml has implemented in the sign-up process? You now have to answer a few questions and basically write your reason for making an account before it lets you even submit the request for review.
To use the tool you need to make your new account first manually - then you can port over your settings with the tool - so it shouldn’t be affected by this.
So no, lemmy.ml shouldn’t be blocking it, unless it’s got something enabled to disable all API logins - though I would think that would break everything (i.e. apps).
Legend
Thanks for this!
Honestly it isn’t. Nothing about the Fediverse is private or inherently secure in that way. Everything is public. And you should assume that everything you publish through activity pub could eventually be looked at by anyone. If you want private or secure messaging there are non-activity pub open source secure alternate. In fact signing up for Lemmy there’s even a field to enter for one. Whether or not a server federates with meta. Meta is still going to data mine the ever-loving shit out of all of them. The point is. None of us are at Meta’s wim about being flooded with their toxic content.
Honestly I want to see meta flooded with our content. So much anti-threads anti Meta sentiment. Actual leftists. And not just make believe right-wing liberals who’ve been conditioned to think that they are left. It would be hilarious to watch Meta try to play wack-a-mole sanitizing everything. To please their reptilian corporate overlords. And if you don’t care and just don’t want to see it. You can always block them personally. Why let them data mine in peace. I say we make them work for it.
I’m not real sure how much the Threads Algorithm is going to pass through Mastodon content (and even less sure if it will even be able to pass through Lemmy content). I think the much more valuable aspect is you can pitch your Threads friends that they can move to the Fediverse and actually get to choose what content they see rather than which influencers paid Meta to fill up your feed.
Agreed about influencers. Meta wouldn’t be doing this at all if they didn’t have a plan (or multiple plans) to monetize it. The whole reason I left Reddit and plan to leave Twitter was that I very much dislike having any part of my online enjoyment at the mercy of the whims of gigantic corporate assholes that think they are far more important than they are. Meta has been an awful and abusive actor in the tech world, why would any freedom-loving person want anything to do with them in a freedom-loving space?! Why would anyone just wait and see what they do this time to decide they’re an awful company with only their profits in mind and no qualms about making those profits at a cost to its users?!
I’ve seen a rationale that makes sense for why they’re making Threads implement ActivityPub. https://lemmy.world/post/1105955
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Oh they are going to fight it either way no doubt. But why make it easy on them I say. And you’re right. If we have access to their content and can provide actual linear feeds like people want with no toxic algorithms. It’s win-win for us and still mostly a loss for them. Even if we defiederate with them they’re still going to data mine we just cut ourself off from reaching those people preemptively.
It’s not really about privacy, though. It’s about the risk of Meta going “Embrace, extend, extinguish” on the fediverse, and the only way to protect against that is by not letting them interact with the majority of it from the get-go. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
People keep saying that. Like it’s something that actually happens. And let’s be clear, it has happened with a number of commercial products. But Microsoft and others have never managed to EEE email, HTTP/HTTPS, Usenet, Linux, Java even. And they’ve tried haaaaaaaaaard. Google didn’t EEE XMPP either. It still exists. I use it daily. The author is misrepresenting what happened.
What happened is that too many people felt obligated to work with corporation that had little interest in working with them. Rather than to focus on their own system and continue to update or develop it. Neglecting their core user base, chasing after people who didn’t seek it out and didn’t care what they were using so long as it worked. They wasted time and effort. But Google didn’t actually kill anything. And all the people using Google talk typically weren’t interested about XMPP in the first place and never would be.
It goes beyond that even. Lemmy is developed by socialists. And not just the more reasonable bunch of socialists like myself. But straight up militant leninists. They’re part of the core development team if not the whole thing. And they have no interest in catering to or coddling misbehaving corporations. They are going to do what they want and what they feel they need to do when they need to do it. And if meta or anyone else tries to screw it up. They’re not going to pay one single bit of attention to them and just keep on doing what they’ve been doing
I would add to this that its not just the fediverse, anything you put on the internet should be assumed to be public and non-deletable. Even with GDPR and everything, if the host deletes everything there could dtill be backups, archives, or some random person, corporation, or government could backup everything. Use secure services like signal for things you want to be private and just assume everything else could be public forever.
100%
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There is a python script floating around that will sync your communities, etc. I’d link but don’t have it handy.
I don’t code.
Here is the script. It’s already written, you just need to run it:
https://lemm.ee/post/608605
Alternatively, there is a browser bookmark that kinda does the same thing: https://feddit.de/post/808717
you can find all sorts of things to customize lemmy over at !plugins@sh.itjust.works or https://sh.itjust.works/c/plugins (shameless plug)
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !plugins@sh.itjust.works
thank you, bot! Updated my post.
How do I run it? Do I go to Command or Run, or do I paste the URL?
I got like 150, that wouldn’t stop me. Plus you can use curl to export the list of the instances you’re subscribed to on your account.
I don’t understand.
I don’t do coding or dark web stuff so I don’t know all the lingo.
There are some tools in the plugins section on sh.itjust.works: !plugins@sh.itjust.works.
https://lemmy.world/post/1171660
This is a tool with a GUI that does profile migration. You can use it in Windows and Linux. It migrates almost everything, including subscribed communities.
Does this work on both Liftoff and the desktop?
It doesn’t matter what app you use to connect to Lemmy, it works with the Lemmy API. But, if you’re asking if it only works on a desktop, that’s a yes. And it works on MacOS as well, just read that in the info.
💀
Yep.
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People think I’m exaggerating when I say Meta is evil, but this is one of the stories that jumps to mind. Awful company.
Oh damn guess I will migrate to lemmy.ml and use that until I find out if lemmy.world defederates or not. (Edit turns out it is run by tankies and they are federated with lemmygrad.) While I may or may not stay on lemmy.world depending on if we federate with meta or not. I will no longer suggest Lemmy.ml.
I’m not in a hurry to migrate, as Threads doesn’t support federation yet, but is not a bad idea to keep an eye on other instances.
Is mastodon.world the same as lemmy.world?
The admin is the same person, so is expected that they apply the same policy for both instances.
Is there a list of who’s blocking or not?
Yes, at https://fedipact.online/
Bloody hell, I literally just switched to Lemmy.world, do I really need to switch to Lemmy.ml? Come on guys
I switched to lemm.ee
They’re still federated with exploding-heads and rammy.site so they didn’t make my short list
What a shame guess I’ll stick to my alt over at lemm.ee for the time being
Tolerance paradox applies here too
You can read the lemmy.world admin response here
Thank you and the other admins for the thoughtful and transparent answer.
Considering that a great percentage of the Fediverse userbase are ex-users of Reddit and Twitter that left due to CEO actions, I get that they (including me) don’t trust Meta or want anything to do with them. I agree that discussion should be civil nonetheless.
Thanks for this, going to delete my lemmy.world account now.
What exact behaviors are they looking for that would cause them to push the block button?
Threads can do very well for themselves without the fediverse as they are already demonstrating. What real motive do they have to join the fediverse except to shut it down?
Heck yeah. That’s a very balanced and rational approach completely unfuelled by emotions.
Can’t say the same for the top comment in this thread, lol.
Facebook doesn’t give a shit about its users and treats them and their data as a crop to harvest. On Meta platforms, you’re the product. On the fediverse, you’re just another user, free to do what you want. Disgust is indeed an emotion, and I’m 100% fine with being disgusted with Meta.
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Is it more rational than only federating once they’ve proven that it’ll be fine? (instead of waiting for them to prove they’re not)
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So far on Lemmy I had never looked for the option to block a single user. You have changed that.
I agree with you!
Oh look, this place is just like Reddit with the rational talk buried in the comments. Thank you for being here despite the apparently unpopular opinion we share.